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Meals that have been cooked and then frozen before being shipped (either to your home via a grocery delivery service or to your area’s grocery stores) offer a lot of convenience, but are overwhelmingly lacking in a lot of other areas. While they might suit those who have fast-paced, on-the-go lifestyles for a period of time, pre-cooked dishes cannot compare in any way to meals that you can prepare yourself, in the comfort of your own home.

If you’ve found yourself dependent on convenient, pre-packaged, frozen food, you are seriously missing out. Read on to find out what you’re missing out on, and what you can do to improve the quality of the food you’re eating.

Dietary Restrictions Can be Planned For

Pre-cooked meals often have lengthy lists of ingredients or are somehow unclear about what composes every aspect of the dish. This can expose someone with dietary restrictions or allergies to food that they would not-and cannot-consume knowingly. However, cooking for yourself allows you to hand-select every ingredient that goes into your meal. This gives you full control as well as comfort in knowing that your food is healthy for you to eat.

Your Meals are Healthier

Pre-cooked, frozen meals are often packed with preservatives. They tend to be high in fats, salt, and sugar, which you can omit in your recipes. When you shop for your meals to cook at home, you can ensure fresher ingredients by skipping the freezer section entirely. Freshly cooked food retains much of the nutrients, vitamins and minerals needed for your body’s healthy functioning. Those with specific vitamin and mineral deficiencies could look at dietary supplements, especially those in softgel format. When sourced from a reputed vitamin d softgel manufacturer, the oral dosages are more consistent and under safe limits.

Practice Portion Control

Many pre-cooked meals come in serving sizes that are gratuitous, to say the least. This results in over-eating and, after some time, weight gain. When you cook for yourself and your family, you can dish out appropriately-sized portions to ensure that everybody is satiated and not gut-bustingly full.

It’s Easier than Ever

With the help of online grocery delivery services, you can get fresh food ingredients to your door with ease. You can skip perusing the grocery aisles, standing in checkout lanes and fumbling with coupons. Instead, you can order your groceries for delivery to your home, all you need to do is type Queens grocery delivery if you are in Queens and you can get a list of delivery services. Now you don’t have to deal with long-winded grocery store trips to get the healthy, high-quality food that you need.

Let Your Inner Chef Shine

Pre-cooked meals don’t grant you the opportunity to experiment with flavors, which is decidedly boring. In the comfort of your own kitchen, you can experiment with your favorite recipes and craft them to your own preferences. This is much more satisfying than heating up a frozen dinner in the oven, because you get to taste your progress as you become a more experienced home chef.

None of this is to say that frozen or other pre-cooked meals don’t have their place in our lives. They do, especially on those days where there is too much to do and not enough time to handle it all. But by no means should these preservative-packed and poorly-portioned make up the majority of your diet. For the cost of these pre-cooked meals or less, you can get all that you need to craft your own meals, no matter the degree of skill you have in the kitchen.

This is a Sponsored guest post by Ash Oak